When your child is leaving

For a believing parent, a child leaving the Church can feel like the failure of the one thing that mattered most, and a threat to the family you were promised in the next life. If you are grieving, it is because you love them. This page is about how to keep them.

What did not cause it

Not your parenting. Not their wanting to sin, or being offended, or being lazy. The Church’s own research and ours find that the people who leave are overwhelmingly the sincere ones: the returned missionaries, the seminary graduates, the ones who read the sources because they took it seriously. If your child was all-in, they were exactly the kind of person this happens to. You raised someone who cares about truth. That is not a failure.

What they are afraid of

Of losing you. Of being treated as a project, a sinner or a disappointment at every family dinner for the rest of their life. Of the grandchildren being used to pull them back. Of you crying every time it comes up. Most adult children delay telling their parents for years because of exactly these fears, and the delay is its own wound when it comes out.

What helps

• Say first that they are still your child. Before any question, before any tears. “Nothing changes that you are mine.”
• Ask, and listen. “What happened?” and then quiet. You do not have to agree. You have to hear it.
• Refuse the stereotypes out loud. “I know you didn’t do this lightly.”
• Keep the door open and the subject small. Church can be discussed one-on-one when they raise it; it should not be the whole relationship.
• Let the grandchildren be grandchildren. Share your faith with them lovingly, as their grandparent; do not undermine their parents.
• Give it years. Most people, on both sides, come round. What breaks families is being forced to choose.

What makes it worse

• Sending the bishop, the missionaries, or talks.
• Telling the extended family or the ward before they have.
• Bearing testimony at them.
• Making every holiday a referendum.
• Treating their spouse as the cause.
• “I’m praying you’ll come back” said as a greeting.

Your own grief

Find somewhere to put it that is not your child. A friend, a therapist, a spouse. Many believing parents in this position have written honestly about it; the Church’s own magazines have run pieces on loving a child who leaves. If it helps to understand what your child found, the Gospel Topics Essays are the Church’s account. If it helps to hear other parents, Mormon Stories has interviewed many, including the parents of adult children who left (16 Communicating with Believing Family and Friends and 17 Communicating with Believing Family and Friends of the podcast were an evening of family stories).

The long view

The parents who keep their children are the ones who decided, early, that the relationship came first and the outcome second. Twenty years of watching this says it is the only strategy that works, and it works far more often than not.